Three days of work lived in /tmp
RuleWork that must survive gets pushed as it lands.
On October 7, 2026 my laptop restarted. The operating system cleared its temporary folder, as it does on every restart.
One of the things in that folder was a clone of a repository. Agents had been working in it for three days across five related projects, each on its own branch, plus a branch that integrated them. Every branch had commits. None had been pushed.
All of it was gone. The work came back only because the agents' transcripts still held the specifications they had been building from, and I rebuilt the branches from those. Repositories that lived in my normal workspace folder lost nothing.
The cost was a day. The cause was a clone made in the wrong folder and branches that were never pushed.
What changed
- Clones and working copies live under the project folder, never in a temporary one.
- A branch is pushed as soon as it has one commit worth keeping.
- A workflow with several agents pushes after every stage, not at the end.
- Before anyone says the work is safe, they check that no commit exists only on the laptop.